[kouteiheika]

If your goal is to make inclusive translation more widely available why license the models under a non-commercial license? This basically makes it impossible to use legally (or at least without a lot of legal risk) for essentially anyone due to the vague definition of what's commercial. Is Facebook hurting for money and looking to commercially license this model on request?

[jw4ng]

This enables any researcher to use our code freely, and build on top of it for their own research. We are not intending to commercially licensing our project.

[kouteiheika]

Okay, but why?

If your aim is to make this technology more widely available and, as you claim, "give people the opportunity to access and share web content in their native language, and communicate with anyone, anywhere, regardless of their language preferences", then why make it so that the model essentially can't be used for anything useful? It doesn't really make any sense.

Legally even the use case which you're promoting on your frontpage - the Wikipedia Foundation's Content Translation - is illegal under the non-commercial license in certain jurisdictions! For example, see here: https://www.techdirt.com/2014/03/27/german-court-says-creati...

Even using it for research would be illegal as it's also not exactly "personal use".